Supposing that atheism is true, is it important to defend its truth? This paper emphatically answers in the affirmative. It argues that if atheism is rationally held to be true, that alone is sufficient reason to defend it, for truth and rational belief are intrinsic goods, and it is generally noble to try to change others' minds when they seem to hold false beliefs. In addition, it considers a number of secondary, supplementary reasons for defending atheism. These range from fighting religiously motivated mistreatment, developing beneficial public policies, redirecting resources going to religious institutions to benefit those in need, understanding our place in the world, and fostering thinking freely as rational and autonomous beings, among other things. It wraps up by considering whether anything indispensable to the good life is lost when we abandon traditional theistic belief for atheism, concluding that the purported benefits of theistic belief over atheism typically evaporate on closer inspection.

On first appearance, Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God offers a highly structured, coherent, and rigorous argument for God's existence grounded in Bayes' theorem, inductive reasoning, confirmation theory, the intrinsic probability of simple hypotheses, substance dualism, and moral realism. But Gabe Czobel questions both the rigor of Swinburne's overall argument, and whether it really yields the conclusion that Swinburne expects the reader to reach. An unsympathetic reader would have difficulty overlooking its major structural flaws, particularly where the argument does not live up to its promise of being grounded in premises undisputed by all. Moreover, it only promises a threadbare deity who is almost robotic in nature, and who offers little assurance of benefit to his adherents in this life or any other.

(2009) Jeffrey T. Allen In his recent work Darwin and Intelligent Design[1], evolutionary geneticist and philosopher Francisco J. Ayala argues that (i) intelligent design theory (ID) is “bad” science and “bad” theology, and (ii) religion and science are epistemologically independent of one another. The present work will focus on showing that if ID is scientifically […]

Since the publication of Raymond Moody's Life After Life in 1975, several investigators have performed outstanding studies of the incidence and properties of near-death experiences. Unfortunately, many authors have enticed readers to accept uncritical supernaturalistic or paranormal explanations for NDEs, causing many good studies to languish unread by mainstream scientists. Despite over 30 years of public interest and scientific endeavor, many promising lines of research have not even been touched upon, while others have not been followed up. This article considers a select inventory of the gaps in our current knowledge of the causes and genesis of the NDE, with particular emphasis on whether NDEs represent scientific confirmation of life after death, or simply manifestations of brain function. The latter is implied by what is germane to the NDE itself, the psychological and sociocultural influences on NDEs, and what it would take to make it possible for something to leave the body during out-of-body experiences and see and hear events going on in the physical world.

In Religion and Morality, Christian philosopher William J. Wainwright provides a thorough, thoughtful, and generally rigorous and fair-minded discussion of the relationship between religion and morality. He considers moral arguments for God's existence, divine command theories of morality, and possible tensions between "human morality and religious requirements," among other things. In this review Stephen Sullivan focuses his remarks on several of Wainwright's debatable claims concerning the divine command theory of ethics and the Euthyphro question, offering a few additional criticisms about Wainwright's methodology.

In his recent opinion on the legality of teaching intelligent design in the classroom (Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board), Judge John Jones correctly found against Dover, but did so by employing mistaken premises. Two unsound arguments appear in Section 4 of Kitzmiller, "Whether ID is Science." The first argument seeks to establish that ID is not a science by showing that it invokes supernatural causes outside of the purview of science. The second argument purports to show that even successful criticisms of Darwinism do not constitute evidence for ID. Neither flaw enhances the scientific credentials of ID, but each bolsters the erroneous perception that Darwinists assume as a matter of faith that either supernatural causes do not exist, or else cannot be investigated scientifically. A natural implication of this erroneous perception is that Darwinism is simply an alternative kind of faith, but in fact both Darwinism and many supernaturalistic hypotheses are amenable to empirical test.

In "No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese," Keith Parsons argues that the success of science in explaining the world makes belief in God logically unnecessary, as science is fast approaching a point where everything has been explained by a completed and well-confirmed physics. As science progresses, he argues, we are left with less and less need to hypothesize the existence of a Creator. But to the contrary, Paul Herrick argues that philosophical theism rests on a rationally satisfying and philosophically attractive logical basis that cannot, in principle, be overturned by the continued progress of natural science.